quantum content blog

I’m an unashamed fan of Mythbusters. In fact, I just can’t get enough of the wacky team trying the impossible and frequently coming up with big explosions.

Discovery channel apparently likes it too, because they’ve started up another show called “Smash Lab” which, you know, sounds like it has potential. But I have to say, it just left me… well, bored. Sure, there were things blowing up, but everyone was so stiff and scripted and let’s say it - pretty - I couldn’t take it. I only watched it once and that was once too many.

So I was despairing. What in the world am I going to do to fill in those long gaps between Mythbusters episodes?

Well, today I found it. And I’m ashamed to admit how long it took me to come to it. I mean, obviously Mythbusters took some cues from this show since it’s been around forever. My only excuse is that the promos for this show suck. And I’m a girl.

The show is Top Gear on BBC America. And it’s all about cars. I mean _all_ about cars. And this is why I had a hard time talking myself into watching it. I like cars, sure. But not the way guys like cars. So the promos made it look almost as boring as Smash Lab. But a few weeks ago I caught the end of Top Gear by accident. And I thought… huh… that’s funny. I mean it. It was funny. That dry hilarious British humor.

So when I saw it was on today I thought “Well sure, let’s give it another try. Maybe last time was just a humor special.”

No, no it wasn’t. This show is even better than the last one. Favorite line so far, referring to a scientist they brought in to help them run a wind tunnel: “You see a beard like that - you know you’re in good hands.” Hah!

And apparently they have an ongoing competition among guest celebrities. They put them in a standard street car and have them run a course to see who can do it the fastest. And they have a leaderboard. Apparently Gordon Ramsey (yes, that Gordon Ramsey) is currently at the top.

Also, I think I’m in love with Richard.

And the wacky project this week - turning a car into a space shuttle. Seriously. They’re building solid rocket boosters in somebody’s garage. This. I. Love!

The eighth in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.

No matter how difficult you find some personality - never put it in writing. Sure, we all need to vent sometimes. We all need to openly discuss our problems at work with someone outside of work who can sympathize and help us stay calm.

But don’t do this via email or even IM if you can help it. Especially not from your desk at work. You don’t own those words. If it was written at a time when you were supposed to be doing work, your employer owns those words, and you never know how they might be used. Even if no one is logging your IMs or reading your email without your knowledge, someone may walk by your desk and see what’s on your screen.

So don’t write steamy love letters at work. Don’t complain about specific people in email or on a blog. Don’t play the blame game in writing. Never send email in anger. Go ahead and write it out if you have to, but then set it aside and wait at least an hour before you hit “send” - and before you do, make sure to read it over carefully and as dispassionately as possible. More often than not, you can just delete it without sending. Your personal feelings rarely have any bearing on business. Remember these people are just your co-workers. They’re not your family. You’ll all move on over time and they won’t have any impact on your life in the future.

Generally speaking, don’t put anything negative in writing. Be vague in the memo and follow up in person or with a phone call to explain further if necessary. One of my supervisors wrote on my review that I was having trouble delegating. Seven years later, a VP saw that and thought I was still having that problem. The negative things hang around for years when they’re in writing.

Real life example of when this principle kept me out of a deposition.

At one point in my career I was juggling a new IP with two powerful owners. There was a long chain of approvals everything had to go through, and still we were skirting a raft of conflicting IP issues. I’m not going to go into detail here because after about nine months this project devolved into a lawsuit between IP stakeholders.

Something my team made turned into a key piece of evidence going before a judge. This was one of those times when I loooooooved my corporate legal team. Talk about overwhelming. Fortunately, my friendly corporate lawyer said, “Well, Wendy, where did you get the materials for making this item?”

At which point I said, “We got it from this person in that place where we got all our approved materials.”

His eyes lit up. “Is there a paper trail for this?”

Yep, all my email for that six months was submitted into evidence. Lawyers on both sides read it, paralegals on both sides read it, file clerks on both sides read it, all the IP stakeholders read it and more embarassingly, some of my bosses and clients read it.

Boy was I glad I’d been careful about what I put in writing. One line I wrote in anger actually became a sticking point in the case. At one point early on we missed a deadline and I had been asked to explain why in an email to my boss. I wrote something vague … something like, “we were held up by the complicated politics going on in such-and-such office.”

Boy, the lawyers were intrigued by that and wanted to know what I meant. I had to justify that one sentence right to the face of the person I had written it about. Fortunately, since I hadn’t been explicit I could explain in detail with a level head - and not on the witness stand or in a deposition on tape. Just to a coworker. She was the one who had to go to the deposition and explain what my emails meant. Because she was in the office where the politics were going on.

The moral of the story is, of course, be careful what you put in writing. You never know when you’ll have to defend it in front of a judge.

The seventh in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.

It takes some experience to know what to get and keep in writing - what white-collar crime doesn’t involve the shredding of documents? Still, some things need to get out of your head and into a format other people can look at. Contracts of course are the most obvious. Any time people work together all the parties involved need to clearly understand what’s expected.

Personally, I love bullet points. One of my bosses loved spreadsheets more than anything in the world. Nothing made sense to this boss unless it was in formatted cells, preferably with charts and graphs. Numbers were optional. I learned a lot about communicating in new ways when I learned how to put things on paper in ways this boss understood and respected.

Even if you don’t consider yourself much of a writer, it can be important to learn how to communicate effectively with words. In some cases, people you can’t work with effectively in person will respond beautifully to a carefully written email.

You can also move up through the ranks a little faster if you prove you can walk out of a meeting and accurately summarize what just happened. It may sound like work someone’s secretary should do, but remember - you’ll be the one controling the message if you take on that responsibility. Definitely don’t lie about what happened in a meeting, but feel free to put more emphasis on the items you feel strongly about. As long as all the important items are included, no one can really complain.

Real life example of how this principle saved my job:

As a manager, I handled a team distributed over a couple of cities. Some of them worked in the same location I did, but we all used instant messenger to stay in touch and keep projects moving. Lots of personalities come and go over the years and as a hiring manager, sometimes you’re responsible for bringing those personalities into the company in the first place.

One person in particular was not happy with her job after doing it for a while. The way she chose to handle the situation is not one I would recommend. I worked with her as best I could, but her complaints turned into accusations which were kind of wild. Fairly early on I started documenting all my efforts and what the results were. I also saved all the IM logs of our conversations.

When this person went to our HR department with outrageous allegations, I had a paper trail to show my side of the story. I wasn’t giving one of my staff special attention at work because we were having an affair. He got rewards because he was meeting deadlines and turning in superior work. Rewards available to all my staff if they earned it. I wasn’t asking her to lie to customers, I was asking her to abide by nondisclosure agreements. You get the idea.

In the end, we parted ways without anyone getting hurt. But only because I got important things in writing and held onto them.

The sixth in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.

Any group working together has to have a set of common goals. If it’s a game company, you’re producing and selling games. If it’s a mod group, you’re creating and distributing mods. In either case these big goals can be broken down into smaller goals. And somebody needs to “own” each of these smaller goals.

Some people (a personality I personally find difficult to work with) resist this process because they see it only as a way to expidite the process of placing blame when something goes wrong - and something always goes wrong.

And I don’t know, I guess they have a point if the corporate culture is one of retribution and malicious firings, but wow… if you’re working in an atmosphere of that extreme toxicity you’ve got bigger problems than difficult personalities.

As a manager, I established accountability (aka ownership) so I could track progress and fix problems before they achieved disastrous proportions. In general, I think most managers have this in mind when they assign milestones and projects to specific people. Embrace it as an opportunity to shine when things go well. And when something goes wrong - and something always goes wrong - resist the urge to place blame. It won’t get anyone anywhere positive, but it will get you enemies. This isn’t conducive to managing up, down or across. (Remember how everything works together?)

This also means if something goes wrong on your own project, take responsibility for your part in it. Did your animation render unexpectedly tie up the server for two extra days? Did your script come in 2,000 words too short? Don’t start pointing fingers. Even if your screw-up was precipitated by someone else’s bad information, resist the urge to publicly flog anybody. This is definitely a skill that requires a long-term view. You may not reap the rewards right away, but it can start to change the minds of people who were previously against you. Everyone recognizes the guts it takes to stand up and be accountable for your actions. Even grumps and sourpusses will start to think better of you if you admit your mistakes.

This is not to say you should be a doormat. One of my mentors used to say, “Externally, take responsibility. Internally, fix the problem.” If you turned something in two days late because the producer told you the deadline while looking at the wrong month on the calendar (hey, it happens), don’t place blame on the producer. Just take responsibility - yep, you turned in your item two days late. But within your team, examine your procedures (or just your own personal procedures for projects you have 100% responsibility for) to see if there are ways you can error-check early enough in the process that it won’t happen again. Double-check that deadline with the producer a few days later. Don’t be passive-agressive about it, just build in the bug fixes as the bugs in the process appear.

Real life example that drove me nuts.

For a while I was responsible for some relatively high-profile websites for a few television shows airing internationally. One of the things users came to these sites for were recaps of shows they missed or couldn’t remember. I know this is one of the things they wanted to use the website for because they wrote me email about it. Lots and lots of email.

And believe me, the volume wasn’t due to the phenominal job we were doing in this area. Our show recaps sucked - and we were the official websites! If anyone should know what happened on show 219, it should be us, right?

Well, that’s how it looks from the outside. But anyone who has ever worked on a big project with a large group of people knows that the initial planning design docs are often significantly different from what gets released to the public. Better? Worse? Who knows. Definitely different. And frankly, these things change right up to the last minute. That’s why DVD’s sometimes have “alternate endings.” You’d be amazed at how last-minute these decisions can be.

It was someone’s job to write up a full synopsis of each episode, but they had to get it done in advance of the show airing and sometimes what they wrote didn’t reflect the final product. This happens with marketing copy in every entertainment industry, I think. My team didn’t have the manpower or the time to write our own synopses, so the websites used the ones we were sent.

The few perpetually optimistic fans seemed to like this - they saw the variances from on-air as a little look “behind the scenes” at what “could have been.” But most fans hated it. They got very cranky about it - and were very vocal. They wanted someone’s head on a pike.

I started trying to figure out who I could talk to about getting these synopses to be a little more acurate. I’d call up one office and say, “Hey, who writes these synopses?” and I’d get the answer, “I don’t know - they just get faxed over to us from this other office.” So I’d call up that other office and ask them. Oh, they didn’t know who wrote it either. It just came to them in a package with a bunch of other items. “Who sends you this package?” Well, that was another office.

Many, many times I went through this process and each time I got different answers. They did all have one thing in common - they ended in a loop. Eventually someone would refer me with absolute certainty back to an office I had already talked to. An office that had washed their hands of any accountability for the errors. In all the years I had anything to do with these TV shows, I never did find out who wrote those materials. As far as I know they distilled out of the atmosphere onto someone’s desk in the middle of the night like dew.

Sure, I have my suspicions, but no one ever owned this problem. Not even my team. I still feel a little bad about that. We handed it over to the fans. “Hey, if you spot a problem in our synopses, write us an email with a correction and we’ll change the website.” You can guess how well that worked.

The fifth in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.

This item is sort of related to the famous “Serenity Prayer” by Reinhold Niebuhr:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Sometimes you’ve just got to achieve a zen state where you ignore the unpleasant people around you who have no real impact on your life or job. Can these difficult personalities change your salary or your job title? Can they influence the people who can? Are you responsible for them in any way? If not, then just smile and nod and let them go on being the way they are. Don’t let them get under your skin.

You can lower your own frustration level if you cut through the caustic attitudes and focus in on which opinions really matter. If your boss (and the people with influence on your boss) is happy with your performance, the criticism and snide remarks from other people can roll off your back.

If the difficult person is one who can influence your salary or your job title or determine what projects you get to work on - figure out what it will take to please them. Sometimes, all this requires is asking them flat out. “I realize I’m not measuring up to your standards. What can I do to improve?” or… “We seem to be having some trouble communicating. Can you help me understand what I need to be doing?” Once you know, you can decide if it’s worth it to you to make this person happy (see the later point about cost-benefit analysis… yep, they all work together).

Sometimes difficult personalities give you a moving target, claiming to be happy if you do one thing and then shooting it down when you perform up to that standard. They are a difficult personality, after all. If this happens, it’s time to start getting these standards in writing. Not to try to trick them, just to establish a baseline you both can agree on. (See also the section on what to get in writing.) Then you can remind them occaisionally that this is the measuring stick you’re evaluating your own performance on.

Real life example of how this principle saved my sanity.

At one point in my career I was in a strange situation where it wasn’t really clear who my boss was. The corporate org chart said I reported to the person across the hall, but that person really had little impact on my daily activity. Another person half way across the country was the one who set the agenda and performance requirements.

Other people locally would often feel the need to comment on what my team and I were working on. It was a little wacky sometimes and lots of people didn’t see how it related to what they were working on. Snide remarks and caustic attitude from coworkers would sometimes get me all worked up and I’d want to go on the warpath. Fortunately, I had some good friends who asked me the pointed question - does it matter what those people think?

They didn’t have a clear view of what my job was and they definitely didn’t have an impact on my salary or title. The directive from my “boss” was to keep Mr. U happy. As long as I achieved that goal, she said she would be happy. So I started just ignoring the negative comments, kept my head down and did what it took to keep Mr. U happy. I could handle that.

When my review came up she did start to quibble about a few of the complaints from other local people, but I could say - look, is Mr. U happy? She had to admit both that he was very happy with the work I was doing and that I was achieving the milestone she had set for me. In the end, we agreed on some new objectives I also needed to achieve going forward, but she admited I shouldn’t be held accountable for requirements I wasn’t aware of previously.

The fourth in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.

Now that I’ve talked about my philosophies on managing up and down, you can probably guess what managing across is all about. Band together, boys. Band together. (Even if you’re not male.)

People on your level on the org chart are your allies, even if they’re in different departments and even if they’re annoying or shy. You’re all in this together, and if you can help each other you’ll be able to call in a marker if you need to - and move as a force when you have to. I’m not saying you need to start a union. I’m saying when you see someone down the cubical row from you hitting crunch a week sooner than you, ask if there’s anything you can do to get them home an hour earlier that night. They’ll return the favor later on.

If you share knowledge instead of hording it, you can combine efforts and better accomplish your own goals. In a large organization it’s tempting to batten down the hatches and defend your turf at all costs. Unfortunately, this strategy results in progress grinding to a halt.

Real life example that saved my sanity:

At one point I was head of a very small department inside a very big company. My group was doing important things, but they were very different things from what the rest of the company was working on. One powerful person was very much of the mindset that his limited resources should be focused on maintaining what was necessary for the majority, and the little minority groups should conform for the greater good. He believed this to his very core, and no ammount of me explaining how badly it hamstrung my department was changing his mind.

I floundered on my own for a while, beating my head against the brick wall. My staff was in revolt, the people above me were disapointed in our work and I was going crazy trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

I wasn’t looking to change the world - I just wanted to be allowed to use a different tech solution. I didn’t even want anyone else to be responsible for maintaining that tech. Still, this was NOT ALLOWED.

Finally I started asking other people across the org chart how they were making due with the one-size-fits-all solution. Some of them were pleased, others were unimpressed but making due. A few other very small departments were also having problems - not to the extent that I was, but they were there.

Suddenly, I wasn’t all alone. Sure, it wasn’t an army, but it was proof I wasn’t crazy. We put our heads together and formulated a plan. We set up a meeting with the brick wall and two VP’s who could tell the brick wall what to do. Together, we were a force to be reconned with.

We illustrated how the one way or the highway method wasn’t working across the board. The VP’s couldn’t see why we shouldn’t be allowed to do our jobs, and could see our nemesis was washing his hands of us. As long as he wasn’t going to be seen as responsible when something went wrong, he was willing to let us go down our road to ruin.

Alone, my problems weren’t big enough to force a change. Together we made a difference - and were quite successful in spite of the dire predictions.

The third in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.

So, you think you’re at the bottom of the totem pole. Managing subordinates is for your boss and your boss’s boss. You are wrong. And when it comes to difficult personalities, they’re all over.

Some people you interact with will see you as being higher on the org chart somehow. Consider the building maintenance staff, receptionists and customers. The person who empties the trash can may not show up on the org chart, but if you’re working 80 hour days, you’re going to discover it’s not house elves vaccuming the rug.

In some companies, seniority is so important (this will come up again when I talk about local currency - everything connects!) the guy who was hired two days after you may see you as higher on the org chart. Be sensitive to this.

So now we know who we’re talking about when we’re talking about managing down, let’s talk about how to manage. The best definition I’ve heard of what managing really is goes like this: managing is the act of helping other people do their job. One of my own favorite managers described herself as my “human shield.” She stood between me and everything in the company trying to stop me from being productive. She fought for me to have the freedom to be creative. She took all the boring administrative meetings so I didn’t have to worry about who changes the toner in the copier. She was my facilitator.

This is how you should see yourself when managing down. It will save you tons of heartache, and sometimes just brighten your day.

Real life example of how managing down can brighten your day:

Like many of us in this industry, I work many late hours. In one office where I lived (as you do during crunch), the maintenance staff came through to empty wastepaper baskets under the cubicle desks promptly at 7:00pm every night. Being a frequent occupant of my desk in the evenings, I would often see the older woman who came through to clean up after all of us. I would say hi and hand her my basket so she didn’t have to try to get around me. She didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Polish, but we could both smile and laugh when my cluttered desk generated only one tiny little piece of trash.

On my birthday one year, a dozen roses were delivered to my desk from a handsome fella trying to catch my eye. I was totally unprepared to deal with a dozen roses at work, although I could outfit a special ops team for a nerf gun battle at the drop of a hat. The roses were still sitting in their box when 7:00pm rolled around. The garbage collection started as usual, but when she got to my desk the Polish woman let out a terrific squeal and ran away. I was mystified and just sat there blinking, trying to figure out what just happened, until she returned with the perfect vase. I have no idea where she found it, but she filled it up with water, trimmed the stems and arranged my flowers for me. What a sweetheart! I don’t even know her name, but she made my day (evening?).

Real life example of how managing down can help your career:

I did a certain amount of traveling in one job, and would sometimes find myself working in LA out of someone else’s office. There was never deskspace for me, and at one point I had to set up shop in the waiting area of a TV producer I worked with. His secretary was in the same space, and we were having a pretty good time. Every phone call I made to this office for a year was answered by this woman, so we had built up something of a friendship.

While I was sharing physical space with her, I got to see and hear her interact with other people on the phone and in person. All of these people wanted a piece of her boss’s time, and she handled them with varying degrees of politeness. I was surprised to hear her dismissing out of hand most of the people who tried to get past her - even people with a lot more clout than I had. At the time I was fairly middle-management, and I realized on a daily basis I was getting more access to her boss than people several rungs up the pay scale. When she had a minute to chat with me, I asked how that happened. She said, “well, you always treat me like a human being. For you, I’ll go ask him if he has a minute.”

Having access to this producer had made the product I was working on worlds better, and I never would have had his cooperation if I hadn’t been nice to the person who answered his phone.

Real life example of how not managing down can ruin your career:

One thing you can always count on in business is change. People move up the ladder at different rates, and in your career you’re bound to be leapfrogged at least once. In the entertainment industry at least, the freight operator really does sometimes go on to be your boss in a few years. And believe me, he will remember if you managed down badly.

This happened to me with someone who worked in HR. When I first met her, she was lower on the org chart than I was. She helped me hire some good people and I found her a pleasure to work with. She did an excellent job of managing up. This skill moved her up the ladder in her department pretty quickly, and in a few years while I was still middle management, she trucked up to a spot higher on the chart than me.

That’s when I discovered her skills at managing down were sadly lacking. Where she had once been pleasant to talk to and happy to help me out, she was now antagonistic and actively undermined me at least once. I realized I couldn’t trust her — and many other people learned the same thing. This did not help her career.

The first in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.

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The concept of “managing expectations” is a deceptively simple one. It just means making sure other people’s expectations of you and your work are in line with reality.On the most basic level, this means being honest. Don’t say you can do something you can’t. Don’t pull a “scotty” (of star trek fame) and claim something will take two days that you can actually do in half an hour. If people have a clear picture of what you’re capable of - and what you’re not capable of - they’re less likely to accidentally set you up for failure. This doesn’t stop them from intentionally setting you up to fail, but if you put things like time estimates in writing (all the items in the list work together, see?) you can back yourself up later when the fireworks start.

On a deeper level, managing expectations means making sure the people around you are prepared for what you’re going to do/give them. This isn’t so much being “honest” as making sure you understand what your part is and that other people are prepared for what you’re going to deliver.

Real life example - something that nearly got me fired:

Part of my job at one time was to send a weekly email report summing up website statistics and providing some analysis. The people I was writing this for didn’t have a technical background, and didn’t know the difference between a “page view” and a “hit,” but they wanted to have a sense of what was going on with the website.

By that time, I had enough experience to know I needed to manage the expectations of the people I was sending this to. So, I made sure I personally knew every one of the people on the “To” line of this email. Many of them were higher up on the org chart than me. Some were VP’s of the company even. When these reports started, I had conversations with all of them about how web statistics are inherently messy. I explained that all we can do is make educated guesses about why one page gets lots more traffic than another, for instance.

In my first reports, I reminded them of our conversations and provided a primer on all the words I used. As time went on, I started leaving out the strong disclaimers about how inexact these statistics were. I didn’t want to be redundant and boring for this group I knew I had educated over time.

What I didn’t know was at some point (not at the beginning) one of the people on the “To:” list started forwarding this email report to other powerful people in the Los Angeles office without any further explanation than I provided. I thought I was writing to a small audience with a certain level of expectations. In reality, the audience was at least three times the size I thought it was, and most of them had very different expectations about this report.

My informal, unframed updates were showing up in their inboxes right next to the formal statistical analysis of television show ratings. Ratings of the TV show these people were creating. As a result, my emails took on an air of importance and accuracy I never intended.

One week, I was faced with a fairly sizeable dip in the numbers. I couldn’t trace the change to any of the usual suspects, and I wrote something to that effect… usual suspects. I wasn’t any more specific than that. If I had stopped there, I would have been okay. But since I thought I was among friends, I brainstormed a little and postulated a few reasons for why the numbers may have gone down. One, among others, was that the web audience didn’t like the episode airing that week. I was trying to stave off the many phone calls saying, “If it wasn’t the usual suspects, what are the unusual suspects?”

Instead, I got an angry phone call out of the blue from a very important producer on the show. He expressed his displeasure with my work, accused me of having subversive motives, and without a trace of irony used the phrase, “You’ll never work in this town again.” This was not an empty threat.

My offhand remark looked to him like a full-frontal assault on his career, and he pulled out the big guns to retaliate.

Let me be clear here. I do not blame him. This was entirely a failure (on my part) to manage expectations. I wasn’t an email newbie - I knew emails were easy to forward, and I knew at least one person on my “To:” list had an itchy trigger finger. I should have continued to manage the expectations of my readers. When I stopped doing that, I lost control of my message and nearly lost my job.

The remedy to this situation? Managing expectations backwards. One little sentence or two at the beginning of the saga would have saved me about a week of explaining and apologizing. In the end, the whole audience knew what to expect from these reports. Expectations managed. In this case - the hard way.

So, that’s my elaboration on managing expectations. Any questions?

Video game development is a fairly male-dominated industry right now. I belong to a mailing list of female game developers, and one conversation there prompted me to write down my personal list of things I’ve learned over my career about how to work succesffully with difficult personalities.
A few people there encouraged me to elaborate on my bullet points, so I thought I’d share the list here - and the long explanations.

I should note that none of these items are particularly revolutionary. Neither are they original to me. I’ve had some excellent role models, mentors and supervisors over the years. Special thanks to Elise Lanoue, who knew how to explain things.

I’ve been lucky. I think all my bosses over the years have ranged from pretty good to really great. However, I’ve worked on some large projects where many people had varying degrees of control. Some of them had some difficult personalities.

My personal list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities:

* managing expectations in general
* managing “up”
* managing “down”
* managing “across”
* who you must truly please and who you can just smile and nod at
* establishing accountability (not the same as placing blame)
* what to get (and keep) in writing
* what to never put in writing (this includes email)
* when to call security (and when not to)
* how to make effective end-runs
* when to play along
* when to panic (and when not to)
* who you can rant to (and who you can’t)
* what the local currency is (not what you might think)
* who you can trust
* what your limits are
* how to do a personal cost/benefit analysis

I saw a headline on AdAge.com recently. It went something like this: SEARCH ENGINES AS POPULAR AS CONTENT PAGES. I found that intriguing, so I bit.

The article is about a study by eMarketer which found people split their web page “views” pretty equally among search sites, e-commerce sites, content sites and communications sites.

I’ve seen people divide up the web this way before. The implication is that search engines, e-commerce sites (anyplace you purchase things) and communication sites (message boards, chat rooms, wikis?, blogs?) don’t have content. Content shows up only on sites with long, scrolling text where you can research the minutea of tulip bulbs or catch up on the daily news. Those are the people who need to think about content design, and if this study is right - users only go to those sites about a quarter of the time.

That is so not the case. Let’s start with e-commerce sites - a category including everything from Tiffany & Co. to Ebay. A broad spectrum of sites with two missions.

#1 Sell Stuff

#2 Enhance the Brand

That’s where people get the idea that these aren’t “content” sites. But they absolutely are. Don’t confuse the content of a site with the mission of a site. Every e-commerce site has content - and I don’t even mean all that text about privacy policies and how to return something you don’t like. The most important content on an e-commerce site is the catalog of products. This is very serious content and the heart of the site. it’s what users are looking for and wanting to read/watch/interact with. It’s the reason they come to the site. No matter what the “mission” of the site is defined as, users don’t think: Hey, let’s go improve my opinion of a brand. They think: I want to buy some shoes. It’s the list of shoes available from the store and the price - that’s the meat of the site. That’s the content. And the mismanaging of that content can short-circuit the mission of the site. They can’t buy the shoes if they can’t find what’s in stock.

Speaking of finding things - search sites are almost always said to have zero content. Again, I think this is wrong. The content on a search site is a list of links. This is how Yahoo got started, lo these many years ago. Some yahoo put up his personal bookmarks on a webpage and invited people to send him an e-mail if they put up a new web page. If he thought it was good, he would add it to his bookmarks.

Sure, the process has changed a lot - it’s no longer one guy’s list of useful links - but it’s still just a huge list of links. That list is the content on a search site. Users may not interact with it by scrolling down a text-heavy page, but the way you interact with content doesn’t define what content is.

And speaking of interaction, this brings us to communication sites. There’s another buzzword for these - they’re also called sites with “user-created content.” Yep, content. Just because the writers are contributing for free in an interactive manner doesn’t mean it’s not content. It may be fluid, temporary and of limited interest - but it’s still content. And to that community of users, it’s the most important content in the world. It’s theirs. They want to be able to pick it up and move it around and edit it and take it back whenever they want. The emphasis for web developers then shifts to the back-end: How do you give the user that kind of control over a web page? But if the focus goes too deeply into how to empower the user, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re empowering them to do. They won’t care if it’s exceptionally easy or pretty to type in their thoughts - if no one can read them.

Content is simply this: why do people come to a website? It’s not the how or the where, although how and where have a huge impact on the user experience. Why would people want to come here? What’s the meat of the site? That’s your content.